I've lurked this forum for a while now, before I even got my A license.... guess its time i finally posted lol.

My issue is with my tracking, I think tracking is fun I like it a lot in fact, but often when I straighten my legs out and bring my arms back I start something that feels like teeter tottering back and forth, can't think of a better way to describe it.

I'm sure with out a video of me it'd be hard to say, but does anyone have some advice I should consider about tracking?

welcome to skydiving man! tracking is a great skill that takes a lot of jumps to perfect, but there are a couple common issues like you describe that are easy to deal with. first most likely what is causing your teeter totter effect is that your legs are too close together. try widening your stand a bit which will greatly improve your stabiliy. secondly people tend to dive a bit when learning to track, so its important that your are pushing against the air with your arms and cupping as much air as possible to get good altitude conservation.

More likely he is "teeter-tottering" because he is getting very little actual forward momentum/drive, and is at a progression point where his "ground-based instincts" are still over-riding his (still to be better developed) air/flight-based ones. In other words, his involuntary reactions and resultant body position ("balance" signals coming from his brain/inner-ear) is to correct for vertical (standing, not head-down) instability - and thus he is "teeter-tottering" the length (vertical axis) of his body, not lateral instability - as your leg-width suggestion would rather have him correct.

dsemac - You are right, without video though, there is absolutely no way for ANY of us on here to tell, or actually, effectively help you correct. First-person, in-air jumping with you, and observing/providing correction/feedback just simply cannot be substituted here.

Your profile indicates you are lucky enough to be at a really excellent DZ, with many talented, highly experienced instructors, coaches and available mentors - who I am sure would be happy to help you out with this. My advice? - Seek them out, in person, and look less for any actual instructional guidance to come from here 1st.

I had a similar thing but i was suggested to loosen up while in track. make sure not to lose the position. This helped me at least and as you loosen up the sway goes away but of course u dont track as good so u slowly tighten up until you are going fast.

Having an experienced tracker jump with you will be the most useful of course... Just my 2 cents

welcome to skydiving man! tracking is a great skill that takes a lot of jumps to perfect, but there are a couple common issues like you describe that are easy to deal with. first most likely what is causing your teeter totter effect is that your legs are too close together. try widening your stand a bit which will greatly improve your stabiliy. secondly people tend to dive a bit when learning to track, so its important that your are pushing against the air with your arms and cupping as much air as possible to get good altitude conservation.

far flat fast are the trademarks of a good track. keep practicing!

Thanks for the tip man, now that I think of it I believe I can recall me pretty much locking my legs together side by side. Gotta spread em a little! :P haha

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More likely he is "teeter-tottering" because he is getting very little actual forward momentum/drive, and is at a progression point where his "ground-based instincts" are still over-riding his (still to be better developed) air/flight-based ones. In other words, his involuntary reactions and resultant body position ("balance" signals coming from his brain/inner-ear) is to correct for vertical (standing, not head-down) instability - and thus he is "teeter-tottering" the length (vertical axis) of his body, not lateral instability - as your leg-width suggestion would rather have him correct.

dsemac - You are right, without video though, there is absolutely no way for ANY of us on here to tell, or actually, effectively help you correct. First-person, in-air jumping with you, and observing/providing correction/feedback just simply cannot be substituted here.

Your profile indicates you are lucky enough to be at a really excellent DZ, with many talented, highly experienced instructors, coaches and available mentors - who I am sure would be happy to help you out with this. My advice? - Seek them out, in person, and look less for any actual instructional guidance to come from here 1st.

I am indeed very lucky to have spaceland as my home DZ, they have absolutely wonderful instructors here, and the atmosphere is awesome.... I understand this is the internet and asking for advice can be sketchy! I can only make it out to the DZ every so often (to stay current mostly) due to being a full time college student and not having much money ontop of that lol... So I try and gather as much resources as I can! And I figure it couldnt hurt to ask here for some advice.... After all its up to me to either take it or leave it!

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Point your toes.

THis is something that I thought I had down while i went through AFF at spaceland but I'll keep it in mind to make sure I'm doing it and not subconsciously letting up.

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Go talk to DJ (or any other instructor/coach there) and they will be able to help you more than anyone on here.

P.S.

DJ is a sucker for root beer so I'm sure you can easily get his attention if he isn't too busy teaching a course with a bottle of that!

Also As I said in the above reply, I only came to ask on here because I dont go to the DZ enough(just to stay current) so I figure I could gather all resources and opinions possible and make wise choices accordingly! lol

In reply to:

I had a similar thing but i was suggested to loosen up while in track. make sure not to lose the position. This helped me at least and as you loosen up the sway goes away but of course u dont track as good so u slowly tighten up until you are going fast.

Having an experienced tracker jump with you will be the most useful of course... Just my 2 cents

I think ultimately what I will end up doing is just get an instructor to jump with me just like in AFF and have them record me and then we can go over the problems later on xD

I think tracking is fun I like it a lot in fact, but often when I straighten my legs out and bring my arms back I start something that feels like teeter tottering back and forth, can't think of a better way to describe it.

It's called porpoising. You have too much arch in your body and it's trying to find a stable point. Roll your shoulders forward towards the ground, the opposite of arching.

Like Jack said, point your toes. Your knees should be locked, legs fully extended. Do NOT bend too much at the waist, esp. at first. Try to flatten out like a board, planking in the air. One of the most important things is heading control. Make sure you keep that as you increase your speed.

Tracking well requires pushing on the air to get the desired results. Keep that in mind when you're tracking. If you're not pushing, you're not tracking.

Stability costs you performance; performance costs you stability. It takes practice to stay straight and stable in a really good track. I'm glad to see you practicing it and trying to get better.

Many, many jumpers don't track as well as they could. Some with 1000+ jumps are downright abysmal at it. It's a huge survival skill to be able to track well. I, too, recommend a little video coaching.

Either this weekend or next weekend, I'm definitely going to give these advice a shot :P. hopefully I can get an instructor there with me too so I can get a video and post it on here/ see what i'm doing wrong.

Now that you mention rolling my shoulders, I can think back and say that I have not been doing that or atleast not well enough, I worried about pointing my toes/ locking my legs out so much that I didnt do anything with my upper body xD

I think tracking is fun I like it a lot in fact, but often when I straighten my legs out and bring my arms back I start something that feels like teeter tottering back and forth, can't think of a better way to describe it.

It's called porpoising. You have too much arch in your body and it's trying to find a stable point. Roll your shoulders forward towards the ground, the opposite of arching.

Like Jack said, point your toes. Your knees should be locked, legs fully extended. Do NOT bend too much at the waist, esp. at first. Try to flatten out like a board, planking in the air. One of the most important things is heading control. Make sure you keep that as you increase your speed.

Tracking well requires pushing on the air to get the desired results. Keep that in mind when you're tracking. If you're not pushing, you're not tracking.

Stability costs you performance; performance costs you stability. It takes practice to stay straight and stable in a really good track. I'm glad to see you practicing it and trying to get better.

Many, many jumpers don't track as well as they could. Some with 1000+ jumps are downright abysmal at it. It's a huge survival skill to be able to track well. I, too, recommend a little video coaching.

This is really good advise. I have outside video of me bending too much at the waist and turning slightly during tracking and it's really obvious looking at the video that it kills performance. Seeing that really helped me getting better.

Rolling your shoulders is good; consider pointing your elbows towards the line of flight. This will naturally roll the shoulder and properly place the head at the same time. It'll also put your torso in the correct configuration so that the "planking" John mentions will be flatter while keeping efficiency.

Tips that helped me: Cup the arms, open the legs a bit, point the toes, but most importantly, (i have a bit of a belly) tighten the tummy muscles. This makes your body cup too, and gives much more level flight. All of that said, pratice and keep heading.

You are right there. OP just done a lic. When you get better, you can do the "max_track", with legs together. Check out the base dudes, the good trackers. They have their legs together from about 1-2seconds, and they can really fly it.

how can you get maximum performance out of a track with your legs spread? you are spilling so much air between them.

As someone that has a degree in mechanical engineering (even if it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I would definitely expect 2 legs separated to have more drag than 2 legs pressed together. There might be some max drag at a particular separation, but it would not be when pressed together.

how can you get maximum performance out of a track with your legs spread? you are spilling so much air between them.

As someone that has a degree in mechanical engineering (even if it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I would definitely expect 2 legs separated to have more drag than 2 legs pressed together. There might be some max drag at a particular separation, but it would not be when pressed together.

how can you get maximum performance out of a track with your legs spread? you are spilling so much air between them.

As someone that has a degree in mechanical engineering (even if it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I would definitely expect 2 legs separated to have more drag than 2 legs pressed together. There might be some max drag at a particular separation, but it would not be when pressed together.

To get a good fast flat track you need to minimize the ratio of drag:lift. Lift good, drag bad.

how can you get maximum performance out of a track with your legs spread? you are spilling so much air between them.

As someone that has a degree in mechanical engineering (even if it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I would definitely expect 2 legs separated to have more drag than 2 legs pressed together. There might be some max drag at a particular separation, but it would not be when pressed together.

To get a good fast flat track you need to minimize the ratio of drag:lift. Lift good, drag bad.

how can you get maximum performance out of a track with your legs spread? you are spilling so much air between them.

As someone that has a degree in mechanical engineering (even if it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I would definitely expect 2 legs separated to have more drag than 2 legs pressed together. There might be some max drag at a particular separation, but it would not be when pressed together.

To get a good fast flat track you need to minimize the ratio of drag:lift. Lift good, drag bad.

Right, so the drag to which I refer would be good drag - lift.

No, drag and lift have well defined definitions in fluid mechanics, and you are not using them correctly.

how can you get maximum performance out of a track with your legs spread? you are spilling so much air between them.

As someone that has a degree in mechanical engineering (even if it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I would definitely expect 2 legs separated to have more drag than 2 legs pressed together. There might be some max drag at a particular separation, but it would not be when pressed together.

To get a good fast flat track you need to minimize the ratio of drag:lift. Lift good, drag bad.

Right, so the drag to which I refer would be good drag - lift.

No, drag and lift have well defined definitions in fluid mechanics, and you are not using them correctly.

Yes, I know that. I took my share of those classes, and I know that such terms are misused constantly. It seemed that you were replying to my earlier post, implying that there was something incorrect. It is not possible to know if you just wanted to make a technical point. I was addressing the OP specific comment - wondering if putting legs together is a good idea for tracking.